Fenton Winery is a versatile venue offering winery, brewery, distillery services, and a wedding destination. The taproom serves high-end food and beverages, all made on-site. They reached out to Grand Rapids Tech to design and develop a new website for them that featured a dynamic menu they could update frequently throughout the day, and a custom integration with their existing Salesforce system. The new site needed to reflect all their offerings to highlight that Fenton Winery is more than just a winery and brewery.
Challenges
Integrating the new website form submissions with their existing Salesforce CRM - The integration was difficult due to the lack of documentation available from their former Salesforce implementer and the uncertainty of what data types were required by the Salesforce backend. Another issue was that the leads being captured were mission critical for the client, so we had to be certain we were capturing leads effectively and were able to log any that were not.
Balancing the menu building user experience and the control the user had over those menus inside the Content Management System (CMS) - We wanted to ensure that the client was able to do all the things they needed to do without overwhelming them with complexity or too many configuration options.
Goals
- Implement various web analytics tools so the user could view them in an easily digestible format with minimal effort
- Maintain good user retention and effectively capture leads from site visitors
- Improve the client's brand perception online (more than a winery and brewery)
Data
This site is still relatively new, and without any previous metrics to compare to, we are still gathering data before we can make any meaningful assessments of the data that has been gathered.
Results and Outcomes
Working directly with the client and a Salesforce representative, we were able to discover the exact conditions required to send data safely and effectively from forms built within the CMS to the existing forms in the client's Salesforce system.
Preventing Bots and Reducing Spam
We were able to massively reduce the amount of spam form submissions the former website was capturing by correctly implementing Google's reCAPTCHA v3 as well as many other widely used bot and spam prevention techniques.
User Experience and Analytics
Using the user experience (UX) focused analytics tool Microsoft Clarity, we were able to determine many site visitors were taking an extra step to access the menu and produced a plan to resolve that issue.
By redesigning the site from the ground up, we were able to integrate some of their existing branding while improving user experience and key web performance metrics including web vitals and other inferred metrics.
Website and CMS Launch
The new website was built using the popular JavaScript framework Next.js with a combination of static site generation and server-side rendering implemented throughout to ensure super-fast page loading and enabling super-fast content changes to the menu when needed.
The client now has a highly capable, infinitely customizable headless CMS built using the Payload CMS framework that allows them to edit all aspects of their site with ease, including their new dynamic menu that is used in-house in their taproom.
